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To be crass and direct, > The goal is to democratize building your own simulation environment with AI agents. Would love to see the community build more comple

To be crass and direct, > The goal is to democratize building your own simulation environment with AI agents. Would love to see the community build more complex interactions on top of this. Let us know what you think! why? what's the point?

tomcam 3y ago
The mission statement you quoted is incredibly clear. Very often both commercial and open source projects announced here on hacker news have completely impenetrable descriptions or mission statements. That is not the case here. I literally could not improve on it without quoting it directly. What is unclear about the portion you quoted?
- jamesdwilson 3y ago
  why did they make this? what is the purpose? why do they want "to see the community build more complex interactions on top of this" - what's in it for them?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
srackey 3y ago
ITS FUN!!! And maybe can be used to do interesting things. Let’s work on the cool tech together. I promise you it will not hack into the mainframe and turn the world into paperclips. (Odds are…near zero).
parallel 3y ago
I'm making a conscious effort to do more things that have no extrinsic objective, to do things just for their own sake. This is a familiar concept, it's a hobby (or art?). I feel I'm missing some of the joy and satisfaction that life has to give by always needing a stated tangible objective.
- jamesdwilson 3y ago
  This is made by a16z, ostensibly for business reasons. I am asking what their angle is. As far as I know, they don't have much history in making things with "no extrinsic objective" - I could be wrong though.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    You misunderstand what a16z-infra is. This is built by Convex, the game engine being used.
    - rybar 3y ago
      Convex is in a16z’s portfolio. https://a16z.com/2022/04/27/investing-in-convex/ https://a16z.com/2022/04/27/investing-in-convex/ That GitHub org is a16z. Their other repos are also showcasing various AI toolings, often the tools are also startups they invest in.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Cooperative agents have a lot of utility in more applied settings and the interesting part here is the agents are autonomous agents operating over an abstract semantic space using LLMs unique ability to “reason” abductively. The key to my mind in these exercises is the construction of constraints, management of context, and delegation to task based optimizers (i.e., the agent has a goal, the LLM abstractly constructs a solution given the context, and optimizers like path finders carry it out) I’ve thought a lot that these sorts of techniques can be used to make things much more generalized. A multimodal model backing say manufacturing equipment can make the equipment much easier to reconfigure to new tasks in an environment that’s more adhoc and includes other machine and human agents. The key to my mind is the fact it’s not just LLMs it’s a mixture of techniques - constraints, optimizers, information retrieval, etc. More specifically the demo involves a lot of Andreessen Horowitz investments to demonstrate them in an accessible way that people find interesting because it’s a game. And people like games.
- jamesdwilson 3y ago
  Thanks! Can you please elaborate on "Cooperative agents have a lot of utility in more applied settings?"
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Imagine being in your shop and telling a robot to get you a hammer. It can understand the instructions, look at the environment using an inverse image model, synthesize the environment with the instruction, delegate to path finders etc a route to the tool box and retrieve you a hammer without ever being programmed anything. Now abstract you to being other machine agents in the environment of a workshop being instructed goals along some plan. Today factory robots are highly specialized machines that require a very finite and controlled problem space and reconfiguration is expensive and time consuming, if possible at all.
    - jamesdwilson 3y ago
      Thank you very much @fnordpiglet for addressing my questions directly and thoroughly! Makes a lot of sense. I still don't understand why a16z wants us to do that though. what's in it for them?
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
Creation?

tomcam 3y ago

The mission statement you quoted is incredibly clear. Very often both commercial and open source projects announced here on hacker news have completely impenetrable descriptions or mission statements. That is not the case here. I literally could not improve on it without quoting it directly. What is unclear about the portion you quoted?

jamesdwilson 3y ago
why did they make this? what is the purpose? why do they want "to see the community build more complex interactions on top of this" - what's in it for them?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

srackey 3y ago

ITS FUN!!! And maybe can be used to do interesting things. Let’s work on the cool tech together. I promise you it will not hack into the mainframe and turn the world into paperclips. (Odds are…near zero).

parallel 3y ago

I'm making a conscious effort to do more things that have no extrinsic objective, to do things just for their own sake. This is a familiar concept, it's a hobby (or art?). I feel I'm missing some of the joy and satisfaction that life has to give by always needing a stated tangible objective.

jamesdwilson 3y ago
This is made by a16z, ostensibly for business reasons. I am asking what their angle is. As far as I know, they don't have much history in making things with "no extrinsic objective" - I could be wrong though.
- Kiro 3y ago
  You misunderstand what a16z-infra is. This is built by Convex, the game engine being used.
  - rybar 3y ago
    Convex is in a16z’s portfolio. https://a16z.com/2022/04/27/investing-in-convex/ https://a16z.com/2022/04/27/investing-in-convex/ That GitHub org is a16z. Their other repos are also showcasing various AI toolings, often the tools are also startups they invest in.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Cooperative agents have a lot of utility in more applied settings and the interesting part here is the agents are autonomous agents operating over an abstract semantic space using LLMs unique ability to “reason” abductively. The key to my mind in these exercises is the construction of constraints, management of context, and delegation to task based optimizers (i.e., the agent has a goal, the LLM abstractly constructs a solution given the context, and optimizers like path finders carry it out) I’ve thought a lot that these sorts of techniques can be used to make things much more generalized. A multimodal model backing say manufacturing equipment can make the equipment much easier to reconfigure to new tasks in an environment that’s more adhoc and includes other machine and human agents. The key to my mind is the fact it’s not just LLMs it’s a mixture of techniques - constraints, optimizers, information retrieval, etc. More specifically the demo involves a lot of Andreessen Horowitz investments to demonstrate them in an accessible way that people find interesting because it’s a game. And people like games.

jamesdwilson 3y ago
Thanks! Can you please elaborate on "Cooperative agents have a lot of utility in more applied settings?"
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Imagine being in your shop and telling a robot to get you a hammer. It can understand the instructions, look at the environment using an inverse image model, synthesize the environment with the instruction, delegate to path finders etc a route to the tool box and retrieve you a hammer without ever being programmed anything. Now abstract you to being other machine agents in the environment of a workshop being instructed goals along some plan. Today factory robots are highly specialized machines that require a very finite and controlled problem space and reconfiguration is expensive and time consuming, if possible at all.
  - jamesdwilson 3y ago
    Thank you very much @fnordpiglet for addressing my questions directly and thoroughly! Makes a lot of sense. I still don't understand why a16z wants us to do that though. what's in it for them?

pyinstallwoes 3y ago

Creation?